Therapy or Sandwich?
I was inspired to write this blog about therapy after watching my partner, Chris, make his sandwiches for work! Yes, this may seem very strange but it all suddenly became clear to me about the different approaches for therapy.
Let me explain…. so, there are many different approaches of therapy available for example Counselling, EMDR, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and of course, Solution Focused Therapy.
All therapy is good and it is all about finding the right approach for you. Therapies have been extensively researched, adapted and refined to become evidence based approaches…. so….what has this got to do with Chris’s sandwich??
Think of each therapy as a popular sandwich filling: cheese, chicken, bacon etc.….. Each one to the right person tastes amazing and because we like it, manufacturers keep making them and we keep buying them. However, Chris’s sandwich was a very unusual combination of… wait for it…. Cheese/egg/lettuce/mayonnaise/mustard/curry sauce and pickle!! Each individual one being very tasty but putting them all together made a jumble of flavours of which it became almost impossible to define each individual filling.
Evidenced Based therapeutic approaches have a similar concept, each one has been well researched and proven to be effective, but when mixed with different approaches it becomes Chris’s sandwich, a jumble of flavours. Some therapist keep adding ‘new tools to their tool kit’ and combining different therapies which ends up as a made up approach with no evidence behind it to say it is effective.
I am an experienced and qualified Pure Solution Focused Therapist with one tool in my tool kit, however my tool is a Multi Tool, and I work with the person not the problem…. and Chris makes his own sandwiches with lots of different fillings!!